Last year, I wrote here warning about a bioethics paper that advocated restricting the amount of orally received food and water given to dementia patients, an intentional undernourishment approach that the authors labeled “minimal comfort feeding.”

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Well, the idea of death by intentional undernourishment has now hit the big time in the popular media with a long New York Times piece telling the story of a dementia patient who died under that regimen. I expect it to spark a national conversation. (I make a brief appearance in the piece. The reporter, Kate Raphael, could not have been more cordial and presented my views accurately. Also, she offers plenty of objections from medical professionals, so this response should not be deemed a criticism of her work.)

The title of the piece asks: “She Didn’t Want to Live with Advanced Dementia. So Why Was She Being Kept Alive?” It quotes the daughter of the dementia sufferer:

“We were never interested in prolonging her life just for the sake of prolonging her life,” Ms. Hendrickson remembered telling the doctor. “We wanted her to just be happy and comfortable.” The doctor, who was not employed by the memory care unit, had a suggestion. She had recently read a paper that put forward a new approach, called “minimal comfort feeding,” in which providers stop scheduled feedings and instead offer dementia patients just enough food and liquid to ensure comfort, and only when the patient shows signs of hunger or thirst. The idea was that someone with advanced dementia with no interest in food, or limited interest, might be allowed to die once they begin to refuse enough hydration and calories to sustain them.

“We were never interested in prolonging her life just for the sake of prolonging her life,”........

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